Food & Shopping Vocabulary (Crisps or Chips?)
You ask for crisps in an American shop and get a blank look. You point at the salt-and-vinegar bag on the rack. "Oh — chips?" says the person behind the counter. Ten minutes later, on a US show playing on your phone, someone orders "chips" with a burger and a mountain of hot golden fries turns up instead. Same word, three different foods.
Here's the thing. English doesn't only part ways over spelling. Plenty of everyday food and shopping words mean something quite different one ocean over, and none of them is "wrong" — they're just local. Nobody's born knowing this. I've watched sharp readers, seasoned writers and more than one confident cook trip over the same handful of words. The good news is that the list is short, and once it's in your head it tends to stay there.
Below is a clean UK-to-US reference for the food, drink and shopping terms people actually stumble on. Read the last column to hear each word in its natural habitat. Where a word is a genuine false friend — looks familiar, means something else — I've said so plainly.
UK to US: a food, drink and shopping reference
| UK term | US term | In context |
|---|---|---|
| crisps | chips | "A bag of crisps for the train." Thin, cold potato slices in a packet. |
| chips | fries (French fries) | "Fish and chips by the sea." Hot, thick-cut fried potatoes with a meal. False friend: UK chips are not US chips — see the note below. |
| biscuit | cookie | "Tea and a chocolate biscuit." A sweet baked snack. False friend: in the US a biscuit is a soft, savoury bread roll, often served with gravy — not the thing you dunk in your brew. |
| aubergine | eggplant | "Roast the aubergine with olive oil." The large purple vegetable. |
| courgette | zucchini | "Grated courgette in the pasta sauce." The long green summer squash. |
| coriander | cilantro | "Fresh coriander on the curry." The green leafy herb. In US kitchens the dried seeds are still usually called coriander; only the leaves become cilantro. |
| sweets | candy | "A little bag of sweets after the shop." The general word for sugary treats. |
| starter | appetizer | "We'll share a couple of starters." The first course of a meal. (You'll be understood either side; the word just changes.) |
| till | checkout | "Pay at the till." The counter where you settle up — Americans also say register. |
| trolley | cart | "Grab a trolley at the entrance." The wheeled basket you push round the supermarket. |
The chips / crisps / fries tangle
This is the one worth pinning to the kitchen wall, because it catches almost everyone.
- In the UK, crisps are the cold, crunchy snack in a packet. Chips are the hot fried potatoes you eat with fish, a burger, or a good dollop of gravy.
- In the US, chips are the packet snack — what a British person calls crisps. The hot fried potatoes are fries or French fries.
So if a US waiter asks "Chips with that?" and you're picturing thick, vinegar-soaked chips from the chippy, a bag of the crunchy sort may well arrive. And ask for "crisps" in Chicago and you may get nothing at all but a puzzled look. An easy rule of thumb: if they're hot, think chips (UK) / fries (US); if they're cold and crunchy in a bag, think crisps (UK) / chips (US).
Biscuit runs it a close second. A UK biscuit with your tea is a US cookie. A US biscuit with gravy is a soft savoury roll — a fine thing at brunch, but not what you had in mind for elevenses.
Watch out for
- Menus and recipes travel badly. Online recipes mix the two systems freely, so check which side of the Atlantic the writer is on before you shop — otherwise "add a cup of chopped coriander" and "serve with chips" can send you the wrong way.
- Till, checkout, register. Brits often say till for both the place and the machine; Americans lean on checkout for the place and cash register for the machine. All three point at the same corner of the shop.
- Don't invent extra differences. Tomato is tomato both sides, banana is banana, and bread is bread. Stick to the genuine divergences above and you'll sound natural rather than over-corrected.
- Clothing false friends are a different domain. UK pants means underwear; US pants means trousers — but that belongs to the clothing list in this pillar, not here. Hop over rather than freestyling it into the food page.
Let's be honest — you don't need to memorise all of this. Locals are almost always happy to explain, and menus usually give the game away. But keep the big ones straight — crisps and chips and fries, biscuit and cookie, sweets and candy, trolley and cart, till and checkout — and you'll order with a lot more confidence, and spend far less time staring at a menu feeling like you've mislaid your own language.
Related reading in this pillar
- Everyday English hub — the map of all the food, drink and daily-life vocabulary lists.
- E0 — foundations for everyday vocabulary.
- E1, E2 — companion everyday and household word lists.
- E4, E5 — the next lists in the food, shopping and daily-life set.
(Spelling differences, hyphenation, apostrophes and capitalisation live in other pillars — this page sticks to word choice and links out for the rest.)
By Roger Fielding